


Call You (From The Edge Of Nowhere)

by Moxibustion (RyuuzaKochou)



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Batquest In SPAAAAACE, Day One: Space, Exile At The End Of The Galaxy, Gundams, Including Common Sense, Jason Todd Needs A Hug, JayTim Week, JayTimWeek2021, Lazarus Pit, Love Conquers All, Love In A Time Of Gundams, M/M, Newtypes (Gundam Wing), Rescue Missions, Tim Drake Needs a Hug, space
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-15
Updated: 2021-03-15
Packaged: 2021-03-23 15:26:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30057549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RyuuzaKochou/pseuds/Moxibustion
Summary: Tim Drake has a mission. A mission so profound he chased his instincts into self exile and out to the end of known space, to the last lonely terminus before the planet Mars. He's on his own, with only his wits, training and determination to help him.He's going to exert all his energy and will into finding what he needs to build his own Gundam, restore his reputation and save his mentor from being lost forever in a different space-time. That's all he can focus on. That's all he's going to focus on.Until he goes into the junkyard at the end of nowhere, looking for parts to help him complete the mission. What he finds instead is a Gundam. A very familiar Gundam. A Gundam that belonged to someone he thought he'd lost, long ago. It's out there, nearly outside his reach.Calling to him.
Relationships: Tim Drake/Jason Todd
Comments: 10
Kudos: 122
Collections: JayTim Week 2021





	Call You (From The Edge Of Nowhere)

**Author's Note:**

> WELCOME to my JayTim Week 2020 Extravaganza! (dramatic flourish)
> 
> I am super stoked for this. I finally have fics ready on time for neeeearly every prompt. Day 7 is going to be late but I kind of knew it would be since it's turning into one of my long jammy-jams. But the rest? We're ready to deploy!
> 
> A lot of them are going to be big, bulky oneshots where I throw a lot of world building around and run away before the plot can try to muscle in. Think of them as samples from AUs I would write for real if I didn't have to do things like eat and sleep.
> 
> For the Day One prompt I almost did Anne McCaffrey's 'The Ship Who Sang' brainship series, but it all got too complicated so I went with Gundams instead. Keep in mind, true Gundam fans, my last and only real deep dive on Gundam was decades ago watching Gundam Wing - the first serial I watched all the way through on my own and was also my slash fic awakening. You don't get any of my JayTim stuff without Gundam Wing. I have been reliably informed that most Gundam aficionados don't consider GW to be canon, but eh, the heart wants what it wants and this is a snippet with no true tie in to any Gundam series in any case.
> 
> All praise and thanks to my lovely betas: Rei Fukai and Queenie on the [Capes & Coffee Discord Server](https://discord.gg/bGhpCDn)
> 
> Enjoy! 
> 
> Day One: Space

“I should come by,” said Dick from the video screen. “For a visit.”

Tim froze in the middle of his data analysis, long since having put the entire exchange of banalities onto the backburner of his awareness so he could run the numbers in front of him. He could usually get away with this on one of Dick’s regular calls; they usually went back and forth about things so inconsequential and bland that Tim could literally reply on automatic, like he was a reply bot. This little gem, however, was not on the list of responses he was prepared for. 

He very carefully didn’t let any of his surprise or consternation show up on his face. “What for, Dick?” he asked, carefully keeping his tone light and airy. “You don’t want to come here and just watch me work, that’d be boring. I’m crunching numbers most days. And besides,” he added in what he considered to be a fairly well-deployed argument. “When will you have the time? Things are busy where you are at the moment. You told me so.”

“Gotham’s never not going to be busy, Timmy,” Dick countered, his face a picture of determined good cheer. “I’m sure I can find people to handle things here for a few days. It’s just been a while since we’ve gotten together, you know?”

Tim flipped through a few more speculations and interest rate accrual account summaries on his other screen on his work desk without really seeing it, thinking furiously for a moment. “Well, I mean, you do call me a lot,” he pointed out reasonably. “We talk. You don’t need to make some huge trip and all the fuss just to check in on me here, especially considering there won’t be anything to do when you get here. I mean, why bother?”

“I just want to see you in person. Talking to a screen is not the same,” Dick persisted.

“Hey, talking to a screen is a lot of what we used to do back h… back in Gotham,” Tim told him dryly. “Oh, and did you get the predictive models for the WayneAg project I sent?”

“Yes, we got them, but Tim,” Dick briefly looked frustrated, like he knew Tim was deflecting. “I still think I should come by. So we can talk, you know. Like old times.”

Underneath the screen, Tim’s fingers tightened on the desktop. “I don’t know, I’m pretty busy at the moment. There is a lot of junk I have to take care of and I can’t really put it off. Maybe I can come visit you,” Tim offered, trying to keep the lameness out of his voice. “In a few months, when… when I’m free,” he carefully omitted any mention of his current employment contract end date. Dick would jump all over that in a heartbeat.

Dick looked at him through the screen view, smile becoming more and more strained, whileTim’s shoulders tensed up. “I’d like that, but I still really want to…”

“Grayson! Where are you?” a voice broke into their tactful but taut standoff. Damian appeared on Dick’s end of the conversation, stomping into the room like he owned the place. “Pennyworth asked me to tell you the parts have arrived… oh,” Damian’s whole face twisted in disgust. “It’s you.”

“Hello, Damian,” Tim said with grit-toothed politeness. “How have you been?”

“We are fully functional now that we’ve jettisoned the dead weight from our midst,” Damian replied with spiteful triumph, a sneer on his face. “Our efficiency has skyrocketed since your unlamented departure. I can’t imagine why you would feel the need to disrupt our lives here where you are _clearly_ not needed.”

“Damian,” Dick said in a low growl. “Shut up and fuck off.”

Damian reeled back, genuinely shocked. For that matter, Tim was too. Damian gave one of his more impressive scowls and turned on his heel angrily. “When you’re finished coddling the defective one’s weak little feelings, we have actual work to do, Grayson,” he told Dick, ignoring Tim. Then he strode away, nose pointed straight upwards, clearly in the throes of mortal insult.

“Sorry,” Dick apologized. “He’s made of ass some days. I really do think I should stop by, Timmy,” Dick said hopefully. “It’s been too long since I’ve seen you.”

“It seems like you’ve got your hands full there, Dick,” Tim replied flatly, not even keeping up the pretense of civility. “Damian needs you, looks like. I wouldn’t want to take you away from that. After all, I’m not your protege. I don’t need to be constantly looked after.”

“Tim…” Dick breathed, looking stricken. “I…”

Tim’s pre-set timers buzzed a warning. “Look, Dick, I have to go,” Tim added hurriedly. “I’ve got duties to get to. I’ll talk to you later on, okay?”

“Tim, wai-!”

“Gotta go,” Tim said and disconnected the call. 

He blew out a breath and ran his hands over his face. Then he left his pokey little office space and into the bridge of his big cargo carrier, the vista of space out of the viewport dominated by a floating sea of old ships, derelict cargo carriers, and, most importantly, old decommissioned Gundams.

When people talk about hardy pioneers breaking through the final frontier whether it likes it or not, they never seem to bother talking about the sheer amount of junk they leave behind them. The salvage field in this area was particularly thick. This bit of space was Terminus Periareus, or, in simple terms, the last stop in the chain of colonies that stretched like a massive string of pearls all the way from the Earth Sphere lagrange points to the closest point of orbit to Mars, which wasn’t, in reality, all that close. When the red planet’s orbit bought it to true periterrus, the closest it got to Earth, the planet itself would still be a couple of thousand lightyears away from the terminus. At the furthest point of its orbit relative to Earth - and therefore, also to the terminus - it could be a couple hundred thousand light-years. But Terminus Periareus was the fabled ‘Last Stop’ to Mars; from this point it was literally Mars or bust. Ships would stop at the big colony to refuel and also where everything a ship didn’t need, had been broken, or couldn’t use, got dumped for a nice, easy lightweight final leg to Mars. It was also where Mars dumped all its heavy salvage that they didn’t want left on the planet’s surface to interrupt the delicate, ever-evolving terraformation process. The Terminus was basically a giant gas station, choked in an ever-expanding cloud of junk.

But, junk under one light was opportunity under a different shade. Tim took over from the autoflight and got into the helmsman chair. Incoming comms indicated the auction was about to start at Magfield 105. He made sure his data encryptions were working and his transmission speed was jacked up to maximum. He’d have to bid _fast._ Fast and decisively. There were plenty of other junkers ships hovering just outside the Magfield barricade. They’d all be bidding on both access and poundage. Salvaging was a ruthless, cutthroat trade; especially around here, where it was the only game in town.

The open line chimed. The auction started.

A flood of bids cascaded across the screens, too fast to follow.

Well, too fast for most. Tim was a Newtype, with all the enhanced cognitive and predictive abilities that granted him. That’s why he didn’t have to use bidder bots like the others were doing. It was just his own hands, dancing unerringly over the keys, moving more intuitively and with more strategic sense than a mere bot could replicate.

He didn’t win the bid for the central sectors, nearest to the giant magnetic satellite that kept all the junk from drifting into shipping lanes, but he’d expected that. His funds weren’t up to that level of bid and the pirates always had an in with the junk traders that little independents like him never had.

But that was fine. His aim was for a little sectorat the edge of the Magfields barrier, right before the point where the magnetic field faded and objects drifted into the endless nothing. These were not the coveted sectors, because anything that had drifted that far out had likely been picked clean of anything remotely useful, but Tim had an inkling about that sector, that special Newtype instinct. There was something valuable in that sector, he could feel it.

He had to be careful, though. Despite his best efforts, some of the people around here knew he was a Newtype. They’d be watching for what he was interested in and try to get in first. He had to make it look like he was bidding for half a dozen other sectors and failing as so not to tip his hand.

Piece of cake. 

In the heady midst of playing the long bidding war con, he almost managed to successfully forget about Dick and his clumsy overtures. He set that aside to deal with on some other day. 

He hoped Dick wouldn’t take it into his head to make a surprise visit. Damian would probably follow, out of insecurity or out of spite, and then it would all end in tears.

Tim blinked and got back to the bidding.

It was a fierce, exhausting, process, where Tim was threatened with death and dismemberment several times by several different firms, but in the end, he got access to his sector. That was a good chunk of his money, and whatever he took out of there would have to fit within his budget per pound, but Tim was elated. He felt the pure satisfaction of a challenge overcome.

He waited in the cruiser until it was his turn to go in, various beeps and warning lights flashing. Truthfully, the cruiser was a bit of a clunker. It would always be an ugly, dented lump of metal and spite held together with space dust, but it did have a saving grace; he could haul tonnes of stuff in it. Tim sizzled with anticipation; maybe today would be the day he got the final parts he needed.

Maybe he’d finally finish his own hand-made Gundam. 

Not the one that he’d been given and then summarily had taken away. His very own, machined from scratch and built from the ground up. He’d need it soon; his readings indicated the Anomaly - that awful, gaping maw filled with eldritch, tentacled Jokers, would briefly break into the atmosphere around Mars within the next few months. It might be his only chance to save Bruce, who had been taken by it around Earth Sphere months before.

The comm system chimed. His funds had been processed and his digital access key added to the system. The Magfield barrier opened. Tim maneuvered his great hulking beast of a carrier in and headed for his sector way at the back of the field. He straight-lined and didn’t deviate. The Gumdam pilots working for the field’s custodian - the Salvage King, as it were - might be piloting what looked like battered and early model Space Force Gundams, but Tim had no doubt they were armed to the teeth and would happily add to the accrued junk with a barrage of fire if it looked like he was straying outside his assigned sector. 

He parked his cruiser right at the static, unmoving field marker designating his sector and took his time running a full scan of the segment of space. It was mostly for show; Tim was reasonably sure he could find what he was looking for on instinct, but it was good practice to do a job thoroughly and besides, if he seemed too overeager someone might swoop in from the other sectors and make it a fight. The Gundams that nominally kept order may or may not help him, depending on who had bribed them this week. 

It gave him time to close his eyes and meditate. He hadn’t felt Bruce’s Call in a few days now. He didn’t know if this was a good sign or a bad one. Newtype abilities were both wonderfully and frustratingly poorly defined. The only thing everyone seemed to agree on was that Newtypes had preternaturally good spatial awareness that let them pilot huge mecha with such precision that they could easily use the massive machine to juggle eggs under gravity and make them dance like they were made of paper mache and not several tons of gundanium. 

Past that fairly useful ability, Newtype abilities were all over the shop. Enhanced reflexes like Tim’s were commonplace but not universal. High intellect was another. Enhanced strength and speed were more hit-and-miss. Enhanced senses were likewise, including things like thermoreception, magnetoreception, and chemoreception, varied wildly depending on the Newtype.

The more esoteric abilities were even more all over the map. The predictive abilities depended on both the person and outside variables. Mental stamina was certainly a notable but not universal trait, as were instances of photographic memory. But one constant was that Newtypes could always sense one another, even across the abyss of space. There was some murmurs about low-level latent telepathy, but who knew? No one ever really tried to define it or standardize it. A Newtype was a Newtype; they somehow just _knew_.

Bruce had always told him that he was different, even from other Newtypes. He didn’t get many of the physical aspects except the reflexes and the speed. Whether or not he got the longevity, time would tell. But Tim’s remote sensing capabilities were powerful, both in instinct and precognition. Whatever he lacked in the physical department compared to the other Newtypes he more than made up for in the mental realm. _Newtype software running on normal hardware_ , Bruce had joked. 

Damian would sneer and say it was because Tim hadn’t been born in space, like all the other Newtypes. He was _defective._

Mind you, Damian said that about just about everyone.

Tim leaned back, eyes closed in mock sleep, since he never seemed to get enough of the real type. 

_Tim…_

His eyes shot open. That was a Call. 

Tim frowned. That… hadn’t sounded like Bruce. After months and months of following the thread of that Call out into the middle of nowhere, he knew Bruce’s Call very well. That hadn’t been it.

Dick, perhaps? Tim couldn’t discount it; after all, if he could supposedly pick up a signal from Bruce when he wasn’t even in the same space-time, then a Call from however many tens of millions of miles between the Terminus and the Wayne Colony at LG4 in the Earth Sphere wasn’t out of the question. That seemed wrong though, not in the least of which because Dick generally wouldn’t consciously use such an ability, even if he had ever demonstrated such a range. If it was unconscious, Tim probably would have heard several hundred Calls by now. Dick was _persistent_ when it came to emotional combat, if not downright clever. He’d know an advantage when he had one.

Tim shook himself. One thing you should never do in space is go with your gut. Space manifestly _did not care_ how you felt and had too many variables ready to rise up and kill you dead. Whoever that Call’s originator was, Tim would need some direction to actually go in before he could investigate. Since he didn’t have that, he’d have to focus on what he came here for. Scan results were bleeping on his screen. How long had he been under for?

He spent some of his allotted time gathering little stuff; some circuitry that could be recycled and sold, some crumbs of gundanium alloy that hadn’t been stripped from old, defunct Gundams, or perhaps had been considered too problematic to get to even for the money they’d get. Tim’s expertly manufactured and programmed robot drones made extracting the tiny fragments a breeze. He hoarded every scrap. 

He grinned fiercely when he found the motherlode; welded where other junkers before him wouldn’t have looked onto the bottom of what looked like a space shipping container drone but what was probably a smugglers rig, was a fine screen of nanobot particulate stealth skin. And, he thought gleefully, there was far more of it than he expected, rows and rows of panels clamped to the bottom of the shipping drone.

He set his own robots drones to work, quickly and efficiently stripping off panel after panel of the stuff. This would put him ahead of schedule! His Gundam would definitely be ready by the time it was needed now!

He directed one of the robot drones to bring a broken scrap of the stealth skin into the main hanger while, outside the carrier, the rest of them were neatly gathering and lashing the precious stealth skin for quick deposit into the cargo bay along with the other scraps. Once he had as much as he could haul, he would go. He didn’t want to draw any attention to himself. He watched the scrap go through decontamination on the security feeds from the hanger. It would be a sample he could start with.

He reflected on the sadness of the field of battered junk around him. There were a lot of old Gundams. Gundam mecha as a technological species had never really gone out of style since humans had begun living in space, but Gundams themselves had gone through many different eras and many different iterations, each new technological advancement rendering previous versions all but obsolete from the moment they were deployed. A Gundam had ultimately been and still remained humankind's first choice in weapons of war, and they were forever searching for that new cutting edge, leaving the rest of the old ones to junk out in the cold of space. There was half a torso here, a floating leg, missing its foot, right there, all so battered and misshapen that even the most optimistic junker wouldn’t try to build anything out of them. More eerie were the almost complete shells, the hollowed-out superstructure of likely inferior armor intact and creepily human-shaped. These were heavy enough to be the first objects to escape the now weak pull of the Magfield. The Salvage Kings didn’t care about derelict junk escaping so long as it drifted away from the shipping lines and avoided collision with Mars. This meant they were drifting slowly away into the abyss, like old, lost knights doomed to wander into the galaxy. 

Tim’s eye caught on one barely in his visual range, almost shaking off the last of the Magfield’s grip, arms askew and slowly turning, like it was trying to halt the journey. Tim could tell from the pitted holes swiss cheesing the joints that junk borer drones had already gone in and stripped everything that could be stripped; precious metals, wires, chips, and computer systems, any interesting or still working joints and piloting equipment, and of course, the reactor core running it. They would all be long gone.

Time felt a swell of sadness, looking at the Gundam. The poor thing had probably had a long life of service. It felt wrong somehow that its eulogy and reward should be spinning out into the galaxy, forgotten and unloved. He felt the same pang of grief that he’d felt when he realized he would never pilot Robin again.

Tim shook himself. Look at him, he thought ruefully, projecting his sadness onto some derelict of ruin as if the Gundam itself would actually care. Besides, he told himself, there was no need to mope. He could build his own Gundam - _would_ build his own Gundam. No one could take it away from him, then. 

He turned to watch the drones finish their work, but his eyes were drawn back to the Gundam, nearly at the edge of being lost. He shook himself again. He was a lot of things but he _wasn’t_ sentimental. The closest he’d ever come to sentiment, to adoration, had been Robin and look how that had turned out. He clearly could not trust his feelings to lead him on a straight vector.

Still, his head turned back to it, despite all his best efforts to cast it from his attention.

The comms beeped at him, jerking him from his trance-like contemplation of the distant mecha. The drones had finished extracting and lashing. Now to begin the delicate task of maneuvering the stuff into the maw of the carrier. His internal clock told him to hurry; his allotted time was receding fast. He took up the remote controls of the polluting console…

... _Tim…_

Tim froze. He looked back at the distant, gently turning Gundam. 

He had a mission, he reminded himself sternly. He had to think of Bruce. Bruce would need a rescue and right now his _only_ hope was Tim, the only one left who still believed he wasn’t gone for good. With this much stealth skin, he wasn’t cutting the razor wire of being ready on time anymore; he’d have time for real systems tests, time for anomaly mapping, time for plans and contingencies that weren’t just going to the place he _thought_ the rift would be and hope.

He couldn’t help anyone if he didn’t know where to go.

_… Tim… Tim…_

His time was almost up. He could have the stealth skin or the Gundam, not both.

_“Fuuuuck!”_ Tim swore violently and turned the clunker around in what would have been a screeching turn under the forces of gravity, punting the precious, priceless stealth skin away in a shattering blow along with a handful of his precious drones. Hitting the aft thrusters, he gunned it.

Alarms started screeching over the comm lines. To the junkers, it must have looked like he was trying to bolt without paying for his poundage of salvage. He could hear the Gundam pilots over the comm as they were dispatched to his position, warning him to turn around or add to the junk heap, but in particles.

Tim killed his aft thrusters because he knew they would not grant him any more warnings. 

“I want that one!” Tim blurted over the comms desperately. They didn’t have to listen to him. They didn’t have to care. “Please, I’ll pay for it, but I want that Gundam there, on my straight vector. That’s all. That’s all I want.”

He waited on tenterhooks. They didn’t have to say yes. They didn’t even have to warn him before spreading him across this sector of space in an expanding cloud of micro debris. He sweated as the pilots went silent, contacting the Salvage King.

His comm beeped. <TRADE. SALVAGE MARKED.>

Tim sighed in frustration. They wanted what he’d already found in trade for the no doubt worthless and derelict Gundam, almost out of their jurisdiction anyway. _And_ he’d still have to pay for the Gundam per pound. Hopefully, most of its innard had been taken because even at its distant position he could tell it had once been a big heavyweight pirate gunner. He wished he could make out the markings, something that would indicate _why_ all Tim’s instincts were screaming at him that it was valuable. 

That it was Calling him.

Tim grudgingly conceded his stealth skin and all the other odds and ends he’d collected, even though it galled him how bad this deal was. It went without saying he’d lost his drones too; the Salvage Kings were greedy tyrants. All he’d have to show for all his bidding and carefully hoarded credits was a derelict Gundam, probably nothing more than a shell. The Call wasn’t extant now; Tim didn’t know _what_ it had been.

One of the two security Gunddam went to tow in the junked Gundam, probably laughing uproariously at Tim all the way. Well, the joke was on them; Tim used the time sprint to the cargo bay, ostensibly to ready the cargo bay to release everything already in there, but actually to grab that small piece of stealth skin from decontam and haul it, grunting and sweating, into the thin smugglers compartment in the wall bisecting his two aft bays. It wasn’t much of a consolation prize, but it was something. With it, he could at least grow some more stealth skin.

Once he had sealed the skin safely where scanners couldn’t detect it, Tim tore like a bat out of hell back to the bridge. When he got there, he stopped dead, the sight in his viewport a sucker punch right in his gut.

He’d found Red Hood. Jason’s Gundam!

Tim paced and fretted while he loaded the Gundam into the carrier bay. It was so big that it couldn’t fit properly. Half his bay droids were crushed, others crammed into wherever they could fit and the rest of them could only lash what they could in place. 

It was an agonizing wait to be taken to the weighbridge and have the ship’s metrics scanned again. Tim sweated as the approximated pounds accumulated on the digital readout and was forced to get into a lengthy and protracted fight with the cashier over a discount, since he was technically saving them time and money by taking this junker off their hands before it could drift into the lines and net them a nice tidy fine for dereliction of duty.

In the end, Tim’s three years running debate champion skills paid off; he was able to squeak just under his available fund limit, although it would be a lean couple of weeks while he made up the shortfall. He took off from the Yard’s environs as fast as his awkward cargo would now allow, the Gundam’s legs dangling out of the back of the carrier while his droids all held on for dear life. 

They probably thought he was crazy.

Maybe he _was_ crazy. 

It’s not like he could even hear the Call anymore. It’s not like he was even sure who or what it was.

But while Tim had many faults, he knew that he was seldom flat out _wrong_ . He _knew_ what he heard.

He pushed the carrier until the engines whined with strain, the flailing legs banging the open aft door edges to misshapen, dented messes. He’d have to do so much heavy panel beating to get the carrier into any sort of good shape to take anything else after this; yet more work that would set him back.

He didn’t care. He pushed harder towards his base; the big, hemispherical Terminus sentinel colony dome just a few parsecs from the salvage field.

They were tiny compared to the Legrange Colonies or even the Terminus. Whole cities were enclosed in those. This had merely been a satellite colony, meant for a handful of researchers, maybe, and someone to man the comms, directing ships that had gone off course from the chain of colonies back on course, and keeping an eye out for pirates and other no-goods. It was a lighthouse in space. And after the terraforming of Mars made the planet liveable, it wasn’t even manned by small groups anymore. It was a literal lighthouse, with its fabled lighthouse keeper keeping a lonely vigil, a job no one wanted anymore, which is why Tim had taken it on. 

He steered the big carrier into the big shipping hanger as carefully as his awkward cargo would allow. Despite the complete chore it would be to rework the environmental systems and reset the gravity pump, he turned it all off and swung the carrier around expertly in the confined space, directing the remaining droids to release the lashings. 

The Red Hood ‘fell’ from the carrier into almost zero gravity within the bay. The centrifugal spin of the sentinel station gave some direction and control to it though and it drifted down towards the floor in an almost soft, slow-motion glide. 

Tim ditched the carrier onto the hanger floor with ungainly gracelessness, wildly askew of his normal precision. He could feel the restless buzz under his skin, a frantic energy that was overtaking his usual cerebral intellect. He didn’t know how he knew, but he knew he had to move _fast_.

He didn’t wait for the atmosphere to become congenial to human life; jamming on his helmet, he sprinted the length of the carrier and leapt out of the now thoroughly dented aft door, into the soundless float of low gravity. Swimming deftly through floating crates, parts, and other detritus that had been stirred up by the sudden loss of gravity, he headed for the heavy tool bay on the maintenance side of the hanger. He’d need the big guns for this, figuratively speaking. The Red Hood was no delicate engine.

He loaded up with as much as he could carry, still more trailing behind him from thick power cables he’s wrapped around his legs. He should be getting into a tougher maintenance suit for this, but the low thrum around his heart told him there was no time. He had to get into the guts of the giant mech _now_ or it would be too late.

He got to work with the crackerjack; the massive mechanical pry bar that techs would usually use to take off the tough outer skin of a mecha. It took him a while to find the right gauge because of course Red Hood wasn’t built to standardized parts, it was a pirate mecha, and finally got to work.

Holding the crackerjack in place and letting it hit the crackpoints in normal gravity was a tough job. In low gravity, it was insanely dangerous. One wrong move and the damn thing would cut him in half as easily as if he were made of paper. Tim grimly went ahead anyway.

He’d known, hadn’t he? He’d known in his heart Jason was still out there somewhere. The darkness of space wasn’t strong enough to snuff out a light that bright.

It wasn’t like fate hadn’t _tried_. They’d thought him _dead_ once before. The victim of an ambush, in the wake of an anomaly event, where all the scavengers liked to fall on people too discombobulated by the anomaly to put up a fight. They’d never found a way to close the anomaly but they’d always managed to get the pirates, who would go in and loot the almost empty colonies when the colonists evacuated the threat. Bat Zero and the rest of the Justice Gundam League were _technically_ a private security force, privateers, but they were the only ones who had made any headway against the ruthless pirates and domination-seeking zealots that seemed to breed in the lawless corners of space.

In one of those lawless corners a battered life support pod had drifted, its occupant in full Lazarus Paramedical Immersion Treatment shock. The Lazarus was meant to be a short-term stasis, a hail mary, meant to keep a body frozen in time until medical intervention could proceed. No one was supposed to be immersed for over a year. It had never happened before.

The Jason that had come back had been different. He’d rejected their Mission, rejected their policy of apprehending pirates who threatened the colonies or zealots trying to take over. He no longer believed in the no-killing philosophy. The pirates that had all but sent him to a starry grave had been captured and released time and again, always going back to their rogue colonies or finding criminal work elsewhere. Being trapped in a metal coffin for _over a year_ , in the black and alone, had stripped Jason of his idealism. The reality that his family hadn’t looked for him had broken him even more thoroughly.

Jason threw away all his old beliefs. He joined teams of mercenaries - outlaw security forces hired by various business concerns or the collective, endlessly victimized poor colony folk. It was the wild west out in space and Jason became the drifting lawman, a hired gun, sometimes an assassin, sometimes a transport hijacker for pay, sometimes a blood-soaked vigilante Gundam pilot.

But never a Bat. Never again.

So he’d said, anyway.

Tim looked up from his work, startled to see the air around him littered with plates of armor. He’d stripped the layer clean off.

The frantic energy still pulsed through his nerves, driving him to carelessly fling aside the crackerjack and disregard the diamond saw that was supposed to be used to delicately remove the ceramic layer under the hard outer shell, and go straight for the resohammer. It wasn’t nearly as delicate as the saw but it was _faster._

Tim hammered like a madman, shards of ceramic flying up around him in a sharp-edged cloud. His suit environmental warnings sounded. He judged the oxygen levels would now be high enough in the bay, ripped off his helmet, sucked in a breath of thin air and kept going, sides heaving with strain.

Even without the PIT syndrome causing random psychotic breaks, Jason had been filled with rage at being abandoned by Bruce and Dick, replaced in Robin by Tim. He hadn’t known, couldn’t have known, Tim had only done so to preserve his legacy. 

What else could Tim have done, with Bruce slowly losing himself to the Zero system, with Dick slowly drifting further and further away from the Earth Sphere? Tim had loved Jason ever since he snuck out in an outdated and dented old Capricorn suit to watch him fight for the freedom and safety of the colonies, and everything that boy had gained was falling apart before Tim’s eyes after he was gone. He had to do _something._

His success had catalyzed the cruelest of ironies; he’d preserved Jason’s memory only to become the target of Jason’s rage himself.

But some part of Tim… had always heard Jason when he Called. Even when they had all believed Jason was _dead_ , Tim had sometimes, faintly, heard him Call. He hadn’t had the faith in his Newtype abilities then that he did now, and had always brushed it off as just a sweet memory of how he always knew when to go out because he could _always_ hear Jason Calling. Always. He had thought - sentimentally, which was unusual for him - that it was Jason still being _with_ him somehow. That Tim was the bearer of his memory into the wide vista of the stars.

He’d chastised himself for telling himself saccharine stories when Jason had turned up unexpectedly alive. They could have found Jason a lot sooner had Tim just listened to his Newtype instincts instead of ignoring them. They could have saved Jason from being imprisoned and enslaved, from being brutalized with horrible training techniques. They could have saved him so much pain and so many scars. Jason had been too blazingly bright, too _good_ of a pilot to be made to submit to mere pirates for too long, but it had been long enough to sharpen the shards left of the boy that Tim remembered.

Tim had lost Jason three times now. Once to the pirates, once to the Hood, and once more in that final fight before Bruce had been swallowed by the anomaly. No one had known what happened to Hood after that battle, and with wreckage strewn across that entire swathe of space no one else could find out either. Pirates had fought pirates, colonists had launched counter attack after counter attack, people were evacuating like panicked rats with the anomaly warning systems going off… it had been bedlam, and no one could work out what side anyone was on.

Dick had believed - or maybe, hoped - that Jason had escaped with the remaining mercenaries and pirates, dragging what they could from their cynical looting; maybe allied with them, maybe just chasing them in his obsessive madness to wipe them from the face of the galaxy. Either way, Dick hadn’t looked too hard at any of the wreckage. 

Damian, in a Taurus he wasn’t actually allowed to pilot, was closer to the anomaly and swore the dreaded Red Hood had been caught in the eddies and flung out of the fight, badly damaged, in which case he was likely dead. Aside from a mild satisfaction that he had one less rival for Bruce’s attention, Damian hadn’t thought much of it beyond that.

Tim, however, Tim had kept hoping that maybe, improbably, Jason had been trying to help Bruce. For all his genius, Tim had never found the knack of separating the bitter assassin from the boy he’d known and admired. Damian would no doubt deride it as another sign of Tim’s instability, so Tim had kept silent on the matter, but somewhere deep inside he’d known.

Jason Todd was out there somewhere.

Now that the ceramic was cracked away, spinning around him like snow, he had to really get down to work. 

Here was where you could really see the damage the salvagers had done to Red Hood. The substructure under the armor was a patchwork of half-melted scars and holes, where termite drones had burrowed in through chinks in the armor’s layers and cut messily through various sensor arrays to get to the good stuff. The Gundanium armor layer was all but completely stripped, cut up, and ferried out of the Gundam’s body in tiny pieces for reforging. The load-bearing joints - also gundanium, had met the same fate or been stripped out of their sockets whole cloth. Great swathes of microprocessors, servers, comm arrays and life support auxiliaries were ripped away. Tim knew without looking that the pilot’s pod would be stripped clean, even of the pilot’s chair.

But he wasn’t aiming for the pod. He was aiming for the gut, right beneath it. Hood had a massive engine, big even in a galaxy that rewarded big mecha and the big guns that tended to go with them. That’s where the Gundanium reactor core was.

Conventional wisdom said the reactor would likely be long gone too. A still working Gundanium reactor would never escape the greedy eyes of the salvagers. They were the only part of a Gundam that you couldn’t easily replicate and without which no Gundam would work at all. They were, in short, more valuable as a single unit than the entirety of the salvage yard rolled together.

But Tim, even though he’d had his Robin Gundam ass kicked by the Red Hood time and again had never stopped being fascinated by it. He wondered if the big mecha’s almost supernatural levels of staying power was down to a dual power core like Bat Zero had. Most people wouldn’t bother; finding places to put that extra power was a chore and maintenance of a dual-core was a lesson in eternal torture. Plus, if someone hit you just right, you had twice the problems and half the options for escape. You had to be a very good pilot and also be willing to have almost no life outside your Gundam, if you wanted to run a dual-core. 

Bruce, unsurprisingly, never had a problem with it.

Tim wondered if, even despite himself, Jason had taken a lesson from Bat Zero. 

If he had, that mattered. It mattered because a dual-core was big, but it didn’t have to be as big as people thought it ought to be. And a salvager would certainly steal a working reactor but would seldom risk trying to salvage one that was dead or damaged on their sensors. They’d leave it be. Radiation poisoning often offends. 

If Jason had a dual-core....yes the scans indicated the black blot of shielded space on either side, two great columns of power with a very narrow space between them.

Now, Tim thought. Hypothetically, Hood would only _need_ one core. A dual-core didn’t make you any faster or stronger. It didn’t grant that much extra life support or thruster power either; you needed the auxiliary systems to match and there were only so many thrusters you could add to a Gundam before it became a) ridiculous and b) unpilotable. A dual-core was usually only for rescue Gundams, so they could move and plug into their rescuees life support system and keep it running. Dual cores were also usually asymmetrical. One would be vastly smaller than the other.

These weren’t. These were both the same size.

Roughly the height of a human coffin, once all the shielding and other power arrays were stripped away. 

Or, maybe, an aux life support pod.

Expensive, yes. Difficult to access, yes. Almost a waste of space. Almost. 

Unless you _really needed_ it.

Tim felt a _thrum_ of urgency take him over. He didn’t stop to think it through; he grabbed the cutting laser and started hacking, hacking, hacking away.

The actual reactor was long gone. There was a great hole in Hood’s back where it had been yanked out like an organ transplant. They’d left the other one, probably because it read on the sensors as leaking radiation.

It was reading the same way on Tim’s too. Red alarms blared on his sensor screen until he smashed them to make them stop. Either he was getting a massive dose of radiation poisoning right this minute or…

… or he was right.

His instincts were screaming at him to keep cutting.

And Tim’s instinct was seldom wrong.

He hacked and spliced through layer after sparking layer, heedless of the burns peppering his suit and, soon after, his skin. He didn’t know how he knew, but he knew that he didn’t have much time.

Molten droplets spun into little cooling spheres in the air as he worked, disregarding all the careful and precise protocols of Gundam disassembly he’d been taught. He ripped great chunks of shielding away to fly to the opposite side of the hander in low gravity.

He worked and worked and worked at it, unheeding of time or the soreness in his body. If someone had seen him now, they wouldn’t have blamed Dick for assuming he was crazy.

Again, he might be.

But _crazy_ wasn’t the same as _wrong._

He didn’t know why he had to keep repeating it to people.

Suddenly, past the wires and the stone lead tiles, he found it.

It definitely wasn’t a reactor. 

Pulse going off like mad, he hastily fumbled for the maintenance crane control, cursing all the while that he’d never gotten the more physical advantages of being a Newtype. He latched the crane cable to the pod and grabbed the resohammer again. This time he aimed for the holding bolt charge points, which, if he remembered his course on mercenary methods of engineering, should be wired with explosives.

He hit the first pin. BOOM!

The shockwave sent him flying. Only the safety cable he’d clipped to a structure beam kept him from leaving a dent in the hanger roof. He shook his head to clear the ringing, swam back down the line, and fearlessly aimed for the next.

The four holding pins took six desperate blows to set off, but the end result was worth it, even though his arms and neck were screaming at him. The pod was loose from its moorings, the protective stealth layer with its sensor fogging array fell away in cracked pieces as it spun loose from its cavity. Tim dumped the hammer and unclipped the safety line, grabbing the pod as it spun gently, drifting amongst the debris of Tim’s hack job on the Gundam.

The view window only showed him a silhouette, but there _was_ a silhouette. There was someone in there.

The viewport was clogged with green. That was bad. The Lazarus fluid was usually blue; if it had gone green, then its life-extending capabilities had run dry, or almost so. There were no life sign readings on the attached equipment, but that equipment was badly damaged, either by Tim in his haste or from the last battle Hood had been in months ago. There was no way to be sure unless…

Tim cracked the pod. Green fluid gushed out, foul and odiferous, half-decayed.

The body inside, however, wasn’t. 

Jason lay in peaceful repose, skin shiny with liquid.

He wasn’t moving. He wasn’t even breathing.

Tim couldn’t hear the Call anymore. He hadn’t for a while. 

“Oh Jason,” Tim gasped, reaching for him. “Jason!” He shook at the body, feeling a sense of despair well up inside him. “Jason! _JASON!_ ”

Jason’s eyes shot open, wide and terrified. He convulsed upward, chest bulging.

Then he vomited up a cloud of foul green, all over Tim, all over everywhere, darker green droplets joining their brethren in making a mess of the entire hanger and everyone in it.

Tim wiped his face and hauled Jason into his arms, keeping the bigger man’s head over his shoulder, his quickest option for keeping him upright and letting him expel all the liquid from his lungs without actually aspirating it back into them and choking. The ugly process of Jason hacking it all up took several revolting minutes, while Tim held on and tried not to think about the slickness wetting his back or the ten hot showers he’d need to take after this, water rations be damned.

Eventually, thankfully, it was just Jason sucking in huge lungfuls of actual air, and only coughing occasionally with nothing else to bring up. Tim cautiously released him from his embrace, grabbing his face in his befouled hands and trying to gauge his level of awareness. “Jason? Can you hear me?” he tried to gently clean the gunk out of Jason’s ears. “Jason? It’s Tim.”

“‘Im,” Jason grunted hoarsely, blinking with watery eyes even in the low light. “B’b B’rd…”

“Baby Bird, that’s right,” Tim couldn’t stop the smile if he tried, even though Jason had always deployed it as a kind of insult.

Jason blinked at him, unfocused eyes clearing. “You foun’ me,” he slurred, coughing again.

“You Called me,” Tim told him, feeling tears prick at his eyes. “Of course I did.”

“Y’ Called _me_ ,” Jason mumbled back, leaning forward to rest on Tim’s shoulder, finally able to sleep in normal air again. “Y’ always Callin’ me. Always missed you.”

“I missed you too,” Tim whispered.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from [Edge Of Nowhere](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKcsqyeArE4) by Hunters And Collectors


End file.
